Barry Levinson has said that his new movie, Liberty Heights, was born when a magazine critic made a breezily derisive reference to the Jewishness of Dustin Hoffman's character in Levinson's dud sci-fi picture Sphere (1998). Why, he asked, make an issue out of a character's ethnicity? The barbs of that (Jewish) critic don't seem like such a big deal to this (Jewish) critic, but in Levinson they clearly touched a nerve. Trounced a nerve, even. He has responded the way his teen-age alter ego Ben Kurtzman (Ben Foster) and friends respond in Liberty Heights when they defy a sign on a local pool that reads, "No Jews, Dogs, or Coloreds Allowed." He's saying, "You got a problem with Jewish? I'll show you Jewish!"

Advertisement

Does Levinson fully understand what teed him off? The charismatic young men in Diner (1982), his first autobiographical work (and his masterpiece), weren't labeled as Jewish, and its most memorable turns were by actors named Kevin and Mickey. In his third on-screen visit to his native Baltimore, Avalon (1990), the milieu finally was Jewish, but the director was more interested in making sweeping points about the cultural fragmentation of the central immigrant family--and, by extension, the American family--than in exploring his tribal or religious roots. (That family was impersonated by those Hebrews Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth Perkins, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Joan Plowright.) The point is: Levinson airbrushed the Jewishness out of his movie memoirs, and that review must on some level have shamed him--made him feel as if he'd been dodging the issue.

The problem, I think, is that he's still dodging the issue. Levinson might be so assimilated by now that he barely remembers what would impel someone to filter the Jewishness out of his or her autobiographical alter egos. On the basis of the family depicted in Liberty Heights, he hardly seems to remember what a Jew is--only what a Jew is not. It's not a WASP. It's not an African-American. As a boy in the exclusively Jewish Liberty Heights section of Baltimore, being Jewish was just being; it was when he perceived his "otherness," the movie suggests, that a more complicated relationship to the world began.

That's what Liberty Heights attempts to recapture. The movie opens in 1954, when 16-year-old Ben first pokes his head out of his neighborhood and when desegregation is starting to bring together disparate ethnic and racial groups. Jews are not only interacting with WASPs and blacks; in the case of Ben and his older brother, Van (Adrien Brody), they're falling for them--much to the horror of the older generation, both white and black. Ben takes a shine to a "colored" girl (Rebekah Johnson), who sneaks him into her (upper-middle-class) house and introduces him to rock 'n' roll and to comedians who make fun of white people. Meanwhile, Van and his buddies crash a Halloween party on the WASP side of town, where Van goes gaga for a chill blonde goddess (Carolyn Murphy) in a fairy-godmother ensemble--the supreme shiksa. Even their dad, Nate (Joe Mantegna), is forced to ally himself with non-Jews. The owner of a dying burlesque house whose side business, the illegal numbers racket, has become his lone source of income, Nate loses a fortune to a small-time black drug dealer called Little Melvin (Orlando Jones)--a loose cannon who ultimately threatens his livelihood and his family.

Levinson's remarks about the review of Sphere--which was released only last year--suggest something else about Liberty Heights: that it was written fast. That might not be a problem if its canvas weren't so broad, but Levinson doesn't work simply anymore. He wants to make an epic. So he spreads the narrative thin, and the script plays like a first draft. It's full of wonderful bits that don't mesh (some of them could be spun off into their own movies) and with characters conceived either too coarsely or too vaguely. Little Melvin is a flaming racist outrage, and I can't make any sense out of Trey (Justin Chambers), a glamorous, rich WASP who's fond of crashing cars and who takes such a liking to Van that he appears to be foisting his girlfriend--the blonde goddess--on the Jew. Is this Aryan guilt, or does he really want to jump Van's bones? No clue from the actors, who look uniformly marooned.

The crosscutting among the movie's various strands is even weirder. While Van and his buddies comb wealthy neighborhoods for a glimpse of his shiksa, Nate auditions a stripper whose costume doesn't arrive and who ends up doffing her conservative street clothes on stage to wild acclaim. Is Levinson drawing a parallel here--saying that Jews are turned on by WASPs because they're so buttoned-up? (I think, alas, he is.) And when he crosscuts between a James Brown concert and a WASP party is he saying that Jews are turned on by blacks because blacks are so unbuttoned--because they shake, rattle, and roll? (Ditto.) Is he saying that coming of age as a Jew means learning to embrace both chocolate and vanilla?

In the end, the narrator, Ben, retreats into generic memory-play mode: "If I'd known things would no longer be, I'd have tried harder to remember them." Loss of the past--that's a universal theme, a "gentile" theme. The director has backed away from what appears to be his real, more local, theme, which is the tug of war within American Jews of his generation between a compulsion to embrace other cultures and a feeling of superiority toward them. That idea is hilariously embodied by his best character, Van's friend Yussel (David Krumholtz), who starts a brawl when he gets his nose rubbed in his Jewishness at one WASP party and shows up for the next with his hair dyed blond and with a tale of Nordic ancestry. I wish there were more of Yussel in Ben and Van, who are both unforgivably wide-eyed and marshmallowy. Their blandness neuters what should be the movie's reason for being.

Liberty Heights is less gaseous than Avalon. The Jewish boys' exploration of life among the "other kind" is often wryly funny, and when they show up at the familiar Baltimore diner to compare notes, time stops and we bask in their banter. If I sound sour compared with other critics, it's because I think Levinson missed a chance to get something unique and audacious on screen: the story of a thin-skinned Jewish kid who'd grow up to make autobiographical movies that somehow leave out the Jewishness and then get so enraged by a critic's offhand projection of Jewishness into a big WASPy sci-fi picture that he vows to go back and remake his other films with Jews instead of gentiles. That would be something to see.

C ritics have been falling all over themselves to announce that All About MyMother marks Pedro Almodóvar's arrival as a mature, world-class director. Not to take anything away from his movie--it's a lovely work--but Almodóvar arrived as a world-class director 15 years ago, when his silly, campy, and impassioned melodramas were like joyous dances on Gen. Franco's tomb. His new work is his most sober, maybe because his alter ego--an 18-year-old devoted son, aspiring writer, and worshipper of flamboyant actresses--gets run over by a car while chasing an actress (who'd just played Blanche DuBois) for her autograph. This shocking act of self-effacement paves the way for a film suffused by the boy's loss. His grief-stricken mother (Cecilia Roth) goes off in search of the father the boy never met--now an AIDS-ridden transvestite in Barcelona--and ends up at the center of a benign matriarchal society that includes the very actress (Marisa Paredes) that her son was pursuing.

The film has been consciously devised as the flip side of All About Eve (1950)--as a tale of women not bitchily at one another's throats but holding one another together through life's most senseless tragedies. (The definition of women here is broad enough to include transvestites and transsexuals.) Things that might once have been screamingly campy are now played "straight": People dramatize their emotions but rarely overdramatize them. And even though the film is full of laughs, the jokes hover on the edge of the abyss: This is a world in which lurid colors and extravagant gestures are means of filling the void.

Almodóvar's movies are the transparent reveries of a gay, star-struck adolescent. Most of us have equivalent fantasies, but we'd be ashamed to expose ourselves by putting them out there. Almodóvar--even here, in his square, Douglas Sirk mode--gives them the kind of soul that banishes embarrassment.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but Pierce Brosnan is growing on me. Ian Fleming's James Bond was a snob and a lightweight. It was only Sean Connery's peculiar combination of traits--he could seem rugged and snooty at once--that made us think 007 a more interesting character than he was. In The World Is Not Enough, Brosnan brings the right Flemingesque irritation to the opening chase. Unlike Roger Moore, who seemed detached from the action (as well as from his stunt double), and Timothy Dalton, who seemed above it, Brosnan makes you believe that Bond's absurd feats are the plausible upshot of his refusal to be bested by social or sexual inferiors. The actor is still sleek, but the touch of crepe paper around his face has eliminated the plastic, department-store-mannequin look that Remington Steele exploited so shrewdly. He's vulnerable now: You don't want his sewn-on suit to get wrinkled, because fine tailoring appears to be all this man has. He even winces in pain a couple of times, and in the climax lets out a grunt that takes the Bond girl (the dire Denise Richards) aback.

The movie is better than you've heard, although that's not saying a lot. I confess I always want to like the latest Bond flick. I have a Pavlovian reaction to the pre-title black-white-and-red bit with Monty Norman's theme and the gun site roving over the latest 007 as he saunters to the center of the frame--I go, "Kill 'em, Bond!"

Much has been made of hiring Michael Apted to bring a more human touch to the series. There's only so much a director can do with the most ironclad formula in movies, but Apted's documentary instincts give the eastern European locations more personality, and the dialogue scenes aren't as choppy as usual: Brosnan and his co-stars actually get a rhythm going. There's even a rare performance from one of the "Bond girls," Sophie Marceau, as a damsel in distress who turns out to be very distressed--psychologically--by a previous kidnapping attempt. Plus, she has a long, rounded chin that I find mysteriously intoxicating.

The filmmakers drop the ball, though, on their master villain, Renard, who has a bullet in his brain that renders him impervious to physical pain. Robert Carlyle is a wonderful (and frightening) actor, but the movie pumps him up to be such a terminator--"his only goal is chaos, and he grows stronger every day until he dies"--that when this little guy comes shambling on and turns out to be such a soulful twit, the movie loses all its credibility. Apted might be too much of a humanist for a Bond picture. It's not so bad that the blows aren't heavily amplified, but when the bad guys get it there isn't that extra sadistic beat to let you know how surprised they are that their aura of invincibility has been punctured. I kept thinking, "Kill 'em again, Bond!"